The Competition Board's On-Site Inspection Authority And The Unilever Decision

As per Article 15 of the Competition Law, the Turkish Competition Authority's case handlers are authorized to exercise on-site inspections during which they can investigate any type of electronic and hard copy documents owned by the investigated company. According to Article 16 of the Competition Law, if the investigated company prevents or obstructs the inspection, it will be imposed an administrative monetary fine equal to the five in thousands of its turnover generated in the previous fiscal year. In fact, in the last months of 2019 and early 2020, the Competition Board decided to impose an administrative monetary fine to four different companies in a row, on the basis of prevention or obstruction of on-site inspection. Among these, the Unilever decision is the most interesting¹ one. Even though Unilever is an experienced company being subject to many on-site inspections in the recent years, the reason for this administrative monetary fine is quite different from